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Publishing Venue

IBM

Abstract

Disclosed are a system and architecture to enhance the performance of state of the art Self Checkout stations used in retail stores by providing a conveyor system to facilitate checkout of problematic items. A means is described to convey problematic items to an attendant who can serve several checkout thus reducing effort, creating a less embarrassing experience for the shopper and speeding the checkout process.

Country

Undisclosed

Language

English (United States)

This text was extracted from a PDF file.

At least one non-text object (such as an image or picture) has been suppressed.

This is the abbreviated version, containing approximately
47% of the total text.

Various types of Self-Checkout (SCO) stations process an increasing share of
the retail transactions, speeding up customer service. Occasionally the consumer at
the SCO needs assistance, and an operator is summoned to help. There is typically
one operator to serve several SCOs, allowing labor cost reduction. However, this
mode of operation and the configuration of the SCOs suffer from some disadvantages
that hamper universal SCO adoption. Arguably, the most crucial disadvantage lies in the
"customer embarrassment factor". If, for some reason, the automatic system fails to
process a given item (e.g., the barcode was not recognized), the customer may feel that
his/her lack of "technical savvy" is exposed. This in turn may cause embarrassment
that will lead this consumer to avoid SCO in the future.

A potential remedy calls for sorting all the items that are put on the conveyor (in
the way similar to the existing checkout stations); The system identifies the items that
can be processed automatically (using barcodes, RFID's, image analysis or other
techniques), while problematic items are automatically routed to stations manned by the
shop employees. This approach offers several advantages such as high throughput
and lack of "embarrassment factor", but has to rely on an automatic device for scanning
and recognizing various items. If such a device has to scan each item from all
directions, it may require several cameras. This would drive up the hardware cost. If,
for practical considerations, single camera is used, the customers will have to place all
the items in the same way (say with the barcode facing up). Naturally, some customers
will make mistakes and as a result automatic recognition rate will go down.

Here we propose to combine the advantages of the existing, sate of the art
SCOs, with the approach outlined above.

Summary of the invention:

Present invention calls for the use of any of the existing SCOs, and improve on
the way rejects are handled. In the present SCO, if an item cannot be processed by
the machine after several attempts of the consumer, some kind of alarm is raised in
order to draw attention of an operator who serves a given island of SCOs. The
consumer has to wait until the operator will be free to attend and help him/her. This
situation may be both time consuming and embarrassing.

In order to avoid such situations, we propose to equip each SCO with a
conveyor. Rejected items would be placed on the conveyor and deflected to the store
operators (cashiers) for manual handling. This approach is most readably applicable to
SCO station equipment with conveyors to begin with (e.g., IBM Full Lane SCO).
However, external conveyors can be added also to the SCO used for bagging goods
(such as IBM Express and Express Plus SCOs).

To summarize the new scenario: Customers will operate SCO stations in a
conventional manner, but in the case of pro...